This is the story of software. The initial blog in this series was all about the structural formation of programming languages. We went all the way back to steampunk days to see how the framework for programming grew out of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1840s. We ended up with a list of the most active programming languages in use at the moment. Now we’ll take the next logical step to examine what programming has done for enterprises and SMBs. We’ll also trace the effects of shockwaves in the world of databases, communications, and mobility.

Technological Change BlindnessThere’s a strange phenomenon known as change blindness that describes how normal people don’t notice massive, obvious changes in their environment. It can emerge from gradual shifts or very rapid transformations that are interrupted by a distraction. For example, a study by Cornell found that test subjects didn’t notice when a researcher, posing as a lost tourist, was replaced by someone else who looked completely different midway through the questioning.

Change blindness is happening right now on a societal level when you reflect on what programmable software has accomplished. Consider how radically our world has been transformed over the past two decades, partially due to hardware upgrades, but mostly due to programming.

In the last decade alone, we’ve seen society rebuilt due to the popularity of:

Managing data on a massive scale thanks to microservices architectures

For anyone too young to have seen it or too busy to remember, here’s a recap of how business records and communications operated in the pre-software era.

Life Before SoftwareHow many times per day do you use your computer? That question really doesn’t make sense for most workers today because they never stop using their computers. This goes beyond developers to every single person in the organization. Every time you check the time, write a note, or make a call you probably did it on the web or using a mobile device. Here are just a few of the jobs that didn’t exist in the recent past:

10 years agoGlobal total app developers = roughly 0. There were the basics of social media, but no social media managers. There were no departments devoted to cloud engineering. Big data analysis was primarily academic. Development and operations didn’t become DevOps until 2009. Even the title “web developer” didn’t get a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) designation until 2010.

20 years agoThere was no such thing as an online marketer. PPC didn’t exist before 1996, and the first keyword auction kicked off in 1998. In 1995, there were only 16 million internet users on the entire planet. Wireless engineers were battery specialists, because the 802.11 WiFi protocol came out in 1997 and widespread adoption would take another decade.

40 years agoThe late 1970s introduced personal computers to the business world, and the modern digital world as we know it can be traced back to that moment. Before that, computers were room-sized monsters like the IBM S/360. In 1976, there were no Apple computers, no Tandy TRS-80s, no Commodore 64s, and no Texas Instruments 99/4s — and IBM PCs were many years away. If you were a programmer, you might be working in UNIX, Pascal, COBOL, C, or Prolog and carrying around a suitcase full of punch cards. You might have a job switching reels of giant magnetic tapes that computers used as memory. There was no such thing as a reboot and crashes were common. You might spend the day pulling up floor tiles and looking for twisted cables. Perhaps the most astonishing fact about this picture is that some of the people you work with right now probably remember those days.

When Windows Were Only GlassBefore computers, offices tended to be loud and smoke-filled. Typewriters rattled everywhere and you could tell who was at work by the cigarette smoke curling above the desk.

Customer data, billing, legal documents, and other important records were made of paper and stored in boxes. The boxes were usually kept in a giant file room that had to be kept updated daily. Security was often non-existent and a disaster like a fire could wipe out a business in minutes. Contacts were often kept on paper rolodex files and everyone had their own.

With the arrival of personal computers, software fundamentally changed all business processes, making them repeatable, transferable, and vastly more productive.

The Database That Changed the WorldYou can spend endless hours arguing about which software has had the biggest impact on history, but every story has to start with 1974’s Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). There was no systematic way for storing and accessing data from the time electronic computers took off in the 1940s until the early 1970s. To find and retrieve information, you had to know where it was stored and how the program worked that did the data storage.

When IBM’s Ted Codd published his twelve rules for relational databases, it became the universal model for storing and structuring data. DB2 and its many children, like Percona and MariaDB, still underpin the global web. This led directly to Structured Query Language (SQL), Oracle, and the database wars of the 1980s. Today, software that has to manage the sheer volume and velocity of big data requires non-relational databases, but even these have their origins in Codd’s matrix.

The Grid and Cloud-Based SoftwareThe history and impact of the internet are too large a subject to be discussed here, but cloud-based software is its latest expression. Software as a Service (SaaS) grew out of “The Grid,” a concept by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman in the early 1990s, at the same time as the birth of the World Wide Web.

They imagined that software should be a metered utility, like electricity, where people just plugged into a grid of resources. Doing that depended on the development of effective cluster management and data residency. Clustered and networked computers used the rapidly developing internet protocols to fetch, process, and deliver data.

That meant that you had plenty of CPU capacity, but the actual machine doing the operations could be thousands of miles away. The connectivity speed of the communications channels hadn’t caught up to the network, generating delays in fetch and execution commands. Bottlenecks in I & O were common and cloud-based software started to gain a reputation for unreliability.

In terms of cloud security, the earliest threats are still the strongest: data breaches from malicious actors, data leakage from developer errors, identity blurring from insecure credentials, and APIs from untrusted sources. Today, whole industries are entirely reliant on cloud-based deployments despite the ongoing security challenges. SaaS was soon joined by Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The mobile workforce revolution would not have been possible without it.

Mobile Software for Working RemotelyOver the past 20 years, telecommuting has gone from a dream to a necessity. A Gallup poll showed that over a third (37 percent) of U.S. workers telecommute some of the time, compared with single digits before 1996. Of those who do telecommute, one in four work remotely more than ten days every month. In terms of effectiveness, 74 percent of those surveyed said that telecommuters are just as productive or much more productive than their co-workers.

The mobile workforce revolution is tied closely to the development of BYOD (“bring your own device”) and “workshifting,” which is the process of moving work to non-traditional times and locations. The three software trends that made this possible were the business app ecosystem, tighter security management tools for remote logins, and data center control panels that could handle all that network traffic. Put them together and the traditional office starts to look more like an unnecessary capital expense whose main function is serve as a backdrop for press conferences. The IDC now projects that 72 percent of the US workforce will be remote workers by 2020.

Industries Without Supply ChainsArguably, the area that has seen the most dramatic changes due to recent software advances has been the finance industry. Finance has no logistics and no production supply chain to worry about. Information about money is what they sell and companies differentiate themselves on how well they manage that information. That’s why the expansion of internet access to more people and robust data analysis has meant so much to the industry. Unlike other information-driven industries, finance concerns every single individual alive today and each entity — whether it is a person or corporation — can have unlimited accounts.

The financial industry has been rocked by more disruptions than any other in terms of software created by SMBs as compared to other large enterprises. It has seen the introduction of new business models like crowdfunding, new forms of online currency like Bitcoin, data integrity disruptions like Blockchain, and new concepts in transactions like peer-to-peer lending.

We’ll go much deeper into these issues for the third and final blog in this series. We’ll look back at how programming changed banks and insurance companies with databases in the 1960s, then follow that through to the latest big data analytics driving capital markets today. You’ll see how programming and software advances have affected all business concerns, from precision marketing to risk management.

In high-production environments where release cycles are measured in hours or minutes — not days or weeks — there's little room for mistakes and no room for confusion. Everyone has to understand what's happening, in real time, and have the means to do whatever is necessary to keep applications up and running optimally.

DevOps is a high-stakes world, but done well, it delivers the agility and performance to significantly impact business competitiveness.

"We're here to tell the world about our cloud-scale infrastructure that we have at Juniper combined with the world-class security that we put into the cloud," explained Lisa Guess, VP of Systems Engineering at Juniper Networks, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

Enterprise architects are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies as they seek to utilize existing data center assets, leverage the advantages of cloud computing and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. This requires a globally aware traffic management strategy that can monitor infrastructure health across data centers and end-user experience globally, while responding to control changes and system specification at the speed of today’s DevOps teams. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Josh Gray, Chie...

"We're a cybersecurity firm that specializes in engineering security solutions both at the software and hardware level. Security cannot be an after-the-fact afterthought, which is what it's become," stated Richard Blech, Chief Executive Officer at Secure Channels, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Mike Johnston, an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io, discussed how to use Kubernetes to set up a SaaS infrastructure for your business. Mike Johnston is an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io with over 12 years of experience designing, deploying, and maintaining server and workstation infrastructure at all scales. He has experience with brick and mortar data centers as well as cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Rackspace. H...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Grape Up will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct. 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Grape Up is a software company specializing in cloud native application development and professional services related to Cloud Foundry PaaS. With five expert teams that operate in various sectors of the market across the U.S. and Europe, Grape Up works with a variety of customers from emergi...

You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Massive Networks will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Massive Networks mission is simple. To help your business operate seamlessly with fast, reliable, and secure internet and network solutions. Improve your customer's experience with outstanding connections to your cloud.

DevOps is under attack because developers don’t want to mess with infrastructure. They will happily own their code into production, but want to use platforms instead of raw automation. That’s changing the landscape that we understand as DevOps with both architecture concepts (CloudNative) and process redefinition (SRE).
Rob Hirschfeld’s recent work in Kubernetes operations has led to the conclusion that containers and related platforms have changed the way we should be thinking about DevOps and...

SYS-CON Events announced today that SkyScale will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SkyScale is a world-class provider of cloud-based, ultra-fast multi-GPU hardware platforms for lease to customers desiring the fastest performance available as a service anywhere in the world. SkyScale builds, configures, and manages dedicated systems strategically located in maximum-security...

The question before companies today is not whether to become intelligent, it’s a question of how and how fast. The key is to adopt and deploy an intelligent application strategy while simultaneously preparing to scale that intelligence.
In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, Sangeeta Chakraborty, Chief Customer Officer at Ayasdi, will provide a tactical framework to become a truly intelligent enterprise, including how to identify the right applications for AI, how to build a Center of Excellence to...

Everything run by electricity will eventually be connected to the Internet. Get ahead of the Internet of Things revolution and join Akvelon expert and IoT industry leader, Sergey Grebnov, in his session at @ThingsExpo, for an educational dive into the world of managing your home, workplace and all the devices they contain with the power of machine-based AI and intelligent Bot services for a completely streamlined experience.

Because IoT devices are deployed in mission-critical environments more than ever before, it’s increasingly imperative they be truly smart. IoT sensors simply stockpiling data isn’t useful. IoT must be artificially and naturally intelligent in order to provide more value
In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Crupi, Vice President and Engineering System Architect at Greenwave Systems, will discuss how IoT artificial intelligence (AI) can be carried out via edge analytics and machine learning techn...

FinTechs use the cloud to operate at the speed and scale of digital financial activity, but are often hindered by the complexity of managing security and compliance in the cloud. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Sesh Murthy, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Raxak, showed how proactive and automated cloud security enables FinTechs to leverage the cloud to achieve their business goals. Through business-driven cloud security, FinTechs can speed time-to-market, diminish risk and costs, maintain continu...

With tough new regulations coming to Europe on data privacy in May 2018, Calligo will explain why in reality the effect is global and transforms how you consider critical data. EU GDPR fundamentally rewrites the rules for cloud, Big Data and IoT. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Adam Ryan, Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Calligo, will examine the regulations and provide insight on how it affects technology, challenges the established rules and will usher in new levels of diligence a...

Existing Big Data solutions are mainly focused on the discovery and analysis of data. The solutions are scalable and highly available but tedious when swapping in and swapping out occurs in disarray and thrashing takes place. The resolution for thrashing through machine learning algorithms and support nomenclature is through simple techniques. Organizations that have been collecting large customer data are increasingly seeing the need to use the data for swapping in and out and thrashing occurs ...

yperConvergence came to market with the objective of being simple, flexible and to help drive down operating expenses. It reduced the footprint by bundling the compute/storage/network into one box. This brought a new set of challenges as the HyperConverged vendors are very focused on their own proprietary building blocks. If you want to scale in a certain way, let’s say you identified a need for more storage and want to add a device that is not sold by the HyperConverged vendor, forget about it....

As many know, the first generation of Cloud Management Platform (CMP) solutions were designed for managing virtual infrastructure (IaaS) and traditional applications. But that’s no longer enough to satisfy evolving and complex business requirements. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, Embotics CTO, will explore how next-generation CMPs ensure organizations can manage cloud-native and microservice-based application architectures, while also facilitating agile DevOps methodology. He wi...

Cloud adoption is often driven by a desire to increase efficiency, boost agility and save money. All too often, however, the reality involves unpredictable cost spikes and lack of oversight due to resource limitations.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Joe Kinsella, CTO and Founder of CloudHealth Technologies, tackled the question: “How do you build a fully optimized cloud?” He will examine:
Why TCO is critical to achieving cloud success – and why attendees should be thinking holistically ab...

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, will discuss th...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Datera, that offers a radically new data management architecture, has been named "Exhibitor" of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo ®, which will take place on Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Datera is transforming the traditional datacenter model through modern cloud simplicity.
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In 2016, artificial intelligence (AI) reached its climax. Research and advisory firm Tractica predicted that the annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $38.8 billion by 2025. The revenue for enterprise AI applications will increase from $358 million in 2016 to $31.2 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.3%. Thus, IT and business decision makers must face up to the potentials of AI already today. For each kind of organization this leads to the question, which type of technologies or infrastructure they can leverage to operate an A...

I recently had the opportunity to give a 10-minute keynote at DataWorks Summit 2017. I know what most of you are thinking: Schmarzo can barely introduce himself in 10 minutes! What sort of keynote could he give in just 10 minutes? And to be honest, I too struggled with what to say.
But after some brainstorming with my marketing experts (Jeff Abbott, Erin Banks, and Chris Hill), we came up with an idea: Pose 5 questions that every organization needs to consider as they prepare themselves for digital transformation. And while I didn’t have enough time in 10 minutes to answer those questions...

In preparation for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, a global 100 financial services organization embarked on a journey to assess its core information processing environments with the objective of identifying opportunities to strengthen its data privacy protection programs. This article focuses on the technology challenges, approach, and lessons learned for the centralized testing environment.

Existing Big Data solutions are mainly focused on the discovery and analysis of data. The solutions are scalable and highly available but tedious when swapping in and swapping out occurs in disarray and thrashing takes place. The resolution for thrashing through machine learning algorithms and support nomenclature is through simple techniques. Organizations that have been collecting large customer data are increasingly seeing the need to use the data for swapping in and out and thrashing occurs in both transaction processing and online analytical processing. Therefore, there is a growing need ...

We all probably remember the movie (“Jurassic Park”), even if we don’t remember this exact scene: Dr. Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum is explaining Chaos Theory to Dr. Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern.
Dr. Malcolm is explaining how random, seemingly negligible events can disrupt even the most carefully laid out plans.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: [after the T-Rex failed to appear for the tour group]. “You see a Tyrannosaur doesn’t follow a set pattern or park schedules, the essence of chaos.”

Increasingly, in a world of compressed times and distances, humans will be the inventors, designers and managers of digital systems and processes, rather than the operators. Operations will be measured in milliseconds, an inhumane speed where only the machines can deliver.
Professor Paul Virilio, a philosopher of speed, urbanist and cultural theorist, wrote at length about the impact of speed on society. He wrote that speed compresses both time and distance. Where once it took a letter 6 months to get to the other side of the world, an email can now arrive in seconds. Today's near real-tim...

The renowned military strategist John Boyd taught that people and institutions collect favorite philosophies, strategies, theories and ideologies over a period of time, and then try to align the future to fit them. The problem with this is the future is rarely like the past, and trying to fit new data into old paradigms often forces us to perform irrational mental gymnastics, which leaves us farther from the truth.

With 10 simultaneous tracks, keynotes, general sessions and targeted breakout classes, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo are two of the most important technology events of the year. Since its launch over eight years ago, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo have presented a rock star faculty as well as showcased hundreds of sponsors and exhibitors! In this blog post, I provide 7 tips on how, as part of our world-class faculty, you can deliver one of the most popular sessions at our events. But before reading these essential tips, please take a moment and watch this brief video from Sandy Carter.

In the cloud era, you as an IT professional are being forced to adopt new roles and take on new responsibilities you may not feel equipped to handle. Businesses are becoming increasingly hybrid, leaving you to manage, secure, monitor, and remediate technology on-premises and in the cloud. Of course, this comes with risks because it means you must manage mission-critical layers of application services across networks, systems, and services you neither own nor control. In fact, in many cases, you may not even have visibility into all the environments you’re responsible to ensure the performance ...

SYS-CON Events announced today that DXWorldExpo has been named “Global Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. Digital Transformation is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

Having a well-rounded brand strategy helps you identify the marketing channels you must focus on, and defines every aspect of how your business is viewed by your customers.
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Deep learning has been very successful in social sciences and specially areas where there is a lot of data. Trading is another field that can be viewed as social science with a lot of data. With the advent of Deep Learning and Big Data technologies for efficient computation, we are finally able to use the same methods in investment management as we would in face recognition or in making chat-bots. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Gaurav Chakravorty, co-founder and Head of Strategy Development at qplum, discussed the transformational impact of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning in maki...

From manual human effort the world is slowly paving its way to a new space where most process are getting replaced with tools and systems to improve efficiency and bring down operational costs. Automation is the next big thing and low code platforms are fueling it in a significant way.
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Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.